For Ken Tsai, the VP of Product Marketing for SAP’s HANA software, every day is constant balancing act. CEO Bill McDermott has declared is mission as spearheading “the intellectual renewal of their company.”

There are lean startups, then there are startups that exist to help large and small companies act more like startups -- like 3Pillar Global. Based in Fairfax, VA, the company sells software to help businesses create their own software and "quickly turn ideas into value" through the entire development development lifecycle. As such, its founder and CEO, David DeWolf, is a big fan of the minimum viable product (MVP).

General Electric is 120 years old. As a company, it is tied into the invention of electricity itself. GE has over 300,000 employees and 2013 revenue that was greater than the GDP of New Zealand. It is the opposite of lean. It has no rights to even claim to be agile. But as Stephen Liguori, Executive Director of Global Innovation and New Models explains, a driving fixation internally over the last decade has been how to meld GE's overwhelming organizational heft with a sense of innovation, speed, and customer focus.

If you were asked to compile a list of the most innovative corporations, it might not occur to you to include a tax, accounting, and finance software provider. But few companies have embraced the art of the startup within a large organization better than Intuit. The makers of TurboTax and QuickBooks have created a work environment that rewards employees for thinking and acting like entrepreneurs. What's more, it has been tapping the collective wisdom of the crowd for insights and ideas that have led to new and successful products.